Grateful Dead

Europe '72: The Complete Recordings - All The Music Edition

Europe '72: The Complete Recordings -All The Music Edition

Our Europe '72 boxed set is now officially sold out, with all 7,200 boxes now gone! We can't thank you enough for your support, for having faith in the project and taking the plunge to purchase this unprecedented release. Despite the fact that it's going to be a bit of a wait before it arrives on your door step, we are sure you'll be blown away with the results.

We are now offering the All-The-Music edition of Europe '72, which includes all of the music recorded on the tour, with each show in its own individual package, complete with its own liner notes by Dead scholars such as David Gans, Blair Jackson, Steve Silberman, Gary Lambert and others, as well as by attendees of some of the shows. You'll get 73 CDs and over 70 hours of prime Grateful Dead.

IT'S ALL ABOUT THE MUSIC...

Because you dared dream this might happen one day… Because you went down to the Gypsy Woman and offered up your first-born to try to make it happen… Because there are enough passionate Dead Heads at Rhino/GD who thought it might be cool for this to happen… It’s happening! Coming in September is a gargantuan EUROPE ’72 MEGA-BOX SET containing ALL 22 SHOWS of what is arguably the greatest tour the Grateful Dead ever played, on a whopping and clearly cosmic73 DISCS (over 70 hours of music!). Bet you didn’t see that comin’!

Really, at this point we probably don’t need to lay on too much hype about how wonderful the music is: Chances are, if you’re even considering buying a copy of this enormous box, you already know how amazing the Dead’s tour of Europe in April and May of 1972 was. To review briefly, though, the Dead’s first tour outside of North America took them to all sorts of historic and unusual venues in England, Denmark, West Germany, France, Holland and even tiny Luxembourg. Many members of the Dead “family” came along on what was really an extended working vacation that was designed to both expose the Dead to new audiences and also reward the band for their unlikely conquest of America during the preceding two years. As a hedge against the costs of the nearly two-month trip, the Dead’s label, Warner Bros., paid for the band to lug around a 16-track recorder to capture the entire tour… and we’re glad they did!

This was a band at the top of its game, still ascending in the wake of three straight hit albums — Workingman’s Dead, American Beauty and the live Grateful Dead (“Skull & Roses”). It had been a year since the lineup had gone to its single-drummer configuration, six months since Keith Godchaux had been broken in as the group’s exceptional pianist, and this marked the first tour to feature Donna Godchaux as a member of the touring band. There was a ton on new, unreleased material that came into the repertoire in the fall of ’71 (after “Skull & Roses” was out) and during the spring of ’72, including “Tennessee Jed,” “Jack Straw,” “Mexicali Blues,” “He’s Gone,” “Comes A Time,” “Ramble on Rose,” “One More Saturday Night,” “Black-Throated Wind,” “Looks Like Rain” and Pigpen’s “Chinatown Shuffle,” “The Stranger (Two Souls in Communion)” and “Mr. Charlie.” (Sadly, this was Pigpen’s final tour.) All those future classics were interspersed with songs from the aforementioned “hit” albums—such as “Uncle John’s Band,” “Brokedown Palace,” “Cumberland Blues,” “Casey Jones,” “Sugar Magnolia,” “Bertha,” “Not Fade Away,” et al — and then were topped off by loads of big jamming numbers — the Europe ’72 tour produced spectacular versions of “Dark Star,” “The Other One” “Playing in the Band,” “Truckin’,” “China Cat Sunflower” > “I Know You Rider,” “Good Lovin’,” “Lovelight” and even the early Pig chestnut “Caution.” And that’s leaving out a truckload of other tunes, too! There wasn’t a clunker show in the bunch, and many are acknowledged today as classics. No doubt you already have some favorites.

Through the years, there have been a few releases of material from the Europe tour—starting with the 3-album Europe ’72 which knocked our socks off in the fall of that year, and followed many years later by material from a pair of German shows and the fantastic 4-CD Stepping Out, culled from the group’s eight shows in England. Incredibly, though, only one full show from the tour has come out previously: the excellent 4/24 concert in Dusseldorf, Germany, released as Rockin’ the Rhein in 2004.

Until now, that is. Jeffrey Norman, who has been the primary mixer of Dead archival multi-track material for the past 15 years (Fillmore West ’69, Ladies and Gentlemen…, Rockin’ the Rhein, Nightfall of Diamonds, etc.) has spent many months toiling over the 16-track masters from the tour, and will continue working on the mixes through the Winter and Spring, employing the high-tech Plangent Processes transfer and restoration tools, trying to get every show to sound “just exactly perfect” (as Bob Weir says) for this release. You might think you’ve heard that intense “Dark Star” > “Sugar Mag” > “Caution” from Copenhagen, but I guarantee you’ve never heard it sound this alive! Mastering to HDCD specs is two-time Grammy-winning engineer David Glasser of Airshow Mastering. Needless to say, all the songs that turned up on previous Europe compilations will be appear in their proper show contexts, and in the case of songs from the Europe ’72 album, without overdubs that were added later (where possible).

So dig deep, raid the penny jar, take a weekend job at Jack-in-the-Box, beg your kindly ol’ grandma for some of your inheritance early… Yes, it’s an extravagance, but jeez, you (or your loved one) deserve it! This is way cool.

Yea I just want them to take the cash, so then I'll know I'm really getting it. Cash can be paid off whenever, if you paid by credit card, sooner the better.

snark ~ sweet dude, you sound like a Floydian, anyways nice info on 'The wall', dvd's thanks. never know what people may say discussing another band on another's page. That's the cool thing about the Dead, cool people mainly.

Spring has arrived, I think ~ and a nice warm summer will be a good omen to this release, can't wait.

It seems dangerous to have to wait all the way until August for them to update credit card info. Why is this so hard?? It shouldn't be this hard to pay for stuff you know?? It's $$ take it for God's sake!

I just want to put in my two cents' worth to say that I hope that the e-mail announcing the final purchase confirmation date gives everybody enough advance notice to ensure that they can make sure there are available funds in their credit or debit account on the date that it will be charged for the set. With 7,200 LARGE packages to ship, not counting the Music-Only sets, shipping is probably going to take several days to complete. I see that many people who ordered used a debit card rather than a credit card, and for their sake it would be good to have their accounts charged quickly so that they don't inadvertently spend the box set money before it gets officially pulled (on pre-orders of smaller things like Road Trips sets--not the subscription, but the actual sets--pre-payments are not actually charged to cards until the shipping date, and that's probably not a good thing here).

Ideally, the final order should have two purchaser options available: (1) charge the payment immediately, and (2) do not charge account until set is shipped. Option 1 is ideal for debit users, who do not pay interest on the charge; option 2 is ideal for credit users, who will pay interest if the credit card is not paid off in full within the (if any) grace period.

For those of you following the Roger Waters/The Wall sub-thread, Roger's tour is currently in Europe, with dates there through early summer. His official site does not have any confirmed tour dates past July 7 (Milan, Italy), and I have not heard any substantiated rumors of a second U. S. tour. There will be an DVD/CD release, based on performances culled from the five nights at the O2 Arena in London, all five nights of which will be professionally filmed. For those of you who access Dime for live recordings, by far the best audience video (I've seen several) is from the 2010-09-20 show in Chicago (available in both a single disc recordable DVD-DL version and a two-disc recordable DVD version; no differences between them in quality, merely the convenience of not having to change DVDs by having everything on one disc, and slightly better compatibility with some older DVD players, some of which don't like recordable DVD-DL discs). Sound quality on the 2010-09-20 show is excellent, too. As good as that tour was (based on the DVD and on several different audio recordings I've heard), I'm glad I chose not to go, because two decent seats (at list price $271 each--OUCH!) for any of the Los Angeles or Anaheim shows would have made it impossible to buy the Europe '72 box. However, when Roger releases the official DVD and CD set I'm going to buy it, and if there are any rumors of a second run through the USA, I'll pre-stock my piggy bank with enough cash to cover the price of two tickets. I will never complain about ticket prices for The Dead or Furthur--at only $90 for The Dead in '09 and average prices of about $50 - 60 for Furthur, Waters' tickets really put things in perspective!

P.S. Saw RW The Wall in October and thought it was maybe the best presented concerts I have ever seen. If anyones interested go to dime torrents for a dvd copy of the show.There are multiple sources all very good.

My response from dead.net customer service (3 different people on different days) and Rhino (I was directed by customer service to contact Rhino) was the exact opposite. Every person I talked to said almost the exact same thing - "We can't make changes to credit card orders until it is closer to the release date". No one could tell me exactly when that would be - somewhere between July and August is what I was told.

I would be interested to know what they say if you would call them right now... When did you talk to customer service? Recently? Sorry to bombard you with questions by the way! I just find this to be ridiculous on many levels especially if you have talked with them very recently. I don't mean to make trouble but none of this makes sense.

thanks for the feeback, happy to hear the show is great so can't wait. I'm lucky enough to have tickets for two nights on may11 and 15th, blocks 101 and 112 ~ actually 'may' sell the 15th sunday show 2x tix ~ great seats, any fellow travler 'head' intersted that may be in the area? Rog is filming all shows 'with possible D Gilmour suprise ~ you never know. Simply I need the extra cash..digging my pockets to pay off this massive release in Sept.

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